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The man with eyebrows that can kill! Not really, but that’s the impression given by the poster illustration. The Baker/Berman producing team gave their Hammer/Terence Fisher imitation a decent production — good color, autopsy-grade gore, female victims in low-cut gowns — but neither Jimmy Sangster’s script nor the flat direction bring it to life. Donald Wolfit is the resurrected mad doctor stealing transfusion blood and committing murders with the help of his deformed servant Victor Maddern but the highlight is the strong performance from favorite scream queen Barbara Shelley. Artus’ fancy special edition Blu is Region A friendly, although the DVD is Pal and all the extras are French-only.

Blood of the Vampire

Blu-ray + DVD

Artus Films

1958 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 87 min. / Le Sang du Vampire / Street Date April 6, 2021 / Available from Amazon.fr / 29.99 €

Starring: Donald Wolfit, Vincent Ball, Barbara Shelley, Victor Maddern, William Devlin, Andrew Faulds, John Le Mesurier, Bryan Coleman,...

He took viewers into the steamy jungles of Tarzan, the sleek (and foreboding) future of Logan's Run, and a skyscraper under siege by a deadly blaze. Filmmaker Robert Day brought many worlds to life in his career, and it's with great sadness that we inform readers that the director has passed away at the age of 94.

According to THR (via Legacy.com), Day passed away on March 17th on Bainbridge Island in Seattle. A British filmmaker, Day made his mark in the world of directing with four Tarzan movies—Tarzan the Magnificent (1960), Tarzan's Three Challenges (1963), Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966), and Tarzan and the Great River (1967)—and he also helmed one episode of the Tarzan TV series in 1966.

Day also directed horror legend Boris Karloff in Corridors of Blood and The Haunted Strangler, and he helmed plenty of other horror and sci-fi projects, including First Man Into Space and Ritual of Evil,...

Robert Day, the British director whose long list of credits includes multiple 1960s Tarzan movies and dozens of TV series and telefilms, has died. He was 94. His family said Day passed away March 17 on Bainbridge Island near Seattle. Born on September 11, 1922, in Sheen, England, his first film was the dark comedy The Green Man (1956), and from there Day would helm movies starring the likes of Boris Karloff (1958’s The Haunted Strangler and Corridors of Blood), Shirley…...

Robert Day, the British director whose long list of credits includes multiple 1960s Tarzan movies and dozens of TV series and telefilms, has died. He was 94. His family said Day passed away March 17 on Bainbridge Island near Seattle. Born on September 11, 1922, in Sheen, England, his first film was the dark comedy The Green Man (1956), and from there Day would helm movies starring the likes of Boris Karloff (1958’s The Haunted Strangler and Corridors of Blood), Shirley…...

In the 1950s, independent film was just as keen to stick its nose in the atomic blender as the Hollywood big boys. Of course, budget restrictions frequently left most of the monsters wanting, be they big or small. But sometimes a shot of quirk was enough to stand apart from the Tinseltown terrors. I give you Fiend Without a Face (1958), a low budget romp content with showing less until it has to show it all, with giddy results.

Produced by British company Amalgamated Productions and distributed by MGM (in the States), Fiend was sent out on a double bill with The Haunted Strangler, a Boris Karloff vehicle. With a combined budget of 130,000 pounds, the double feature brought in domestic and international receipts of over $ 650,000 dollars, filmic diplomacy at its finest.

Filmed in Britain but taking place in Winthrop (?), Manitoba, Canada (never heard of the town, and if I haven’t drank in it,...

The hardest part about choosing my favourite horror films of all time, is deciding what stays and what goes. I started with a list that featured over 200 titles, and I think it took me more time to pick and choose between them, than it did to actually sit down and write each capsule review. In order to hold on to my sanity, I decided to not include short films, documentaries, television mini-series and animated films. I also had to draw the line at some point in deciding if certain movies should be considered horror or not. In such cases where I was split down the middle in deciding, I let IMDb be the judge for me. And in some cases, I’ve included these titles as special mentions. Long story short, I can’t include every movie I like, and I have to draw the line somewhere. With that said,...

Throughout the month of October, Editor-in-Chief and resident Horror expert Ricky D, will be posting a list of his favorite Horror films of all time. The list will be posted in six parts. Click here to see every entry.

As with all lists, this is personal and nobody will agree with every choice – and if you do, that would be incredibly disturbing. It was almost impossible for me to rank them in order, but I tried and eventually gave up.

****

Special Mention: Gremlins

Directed by Joe Dante

Written by Chris Columbus

1984, USA

Gremlins gets a special mention because I’ve always considered it more of a comedy and a wholesome Christmas flick than an actual horror film. This tribute the 1950s matinee genre stands the test of time from a time when parents would take their children to family films that pushed the boundaries of the MPAA. Joe Dante is...

Catherine Grant's retweeted an intriguing find from Alternative Takes, the January/February 1980 issue of Radical America (Pdf). From the "Introduction": "Lynn Garafola's article, 'Hollywood and the Myth of the Working Class,' discusses such box office successes as Rocky, The Deer Hunter, Saturday Night Fever and Norma Rae, as well as some commercial productions that didn't do so well, such as Blue Collar and F.I.S.T. John Demeter's article, on the other hand, looks at two examples of a new class of technically advanced non-Hollywood left-wing movies: The Wobblies and Northern Lights. In a curious way, the Hollywood films that Garafola writes about are more political than the left-wing films."

For Bookforum, John Domini reviews Paolo Sorrentino's first novel, Everybody's Right, and finds that "this filmmaker's energetic wallow in prose does seem best appreciated as a cry for the beloved country, resonating off touchstones from...

Canny film producer known for his horror and sci-fi classics

The producer Richard Gordon, who has died aged 85, was involved with several offbeat classics of horror and science-fiction cinema. These included Arthur Crabtree's Fiend Without a Face (1958), which climaxes with a still-astonishing siege of a power station by disembodied, tentacled, malicious human brains, and Antony Balch's Horror Hospital (1973), a lively and perverse mad-scientist satire featuring Michael Gough and Robin Askwith.

It may be that Gordon and his brother, Alex, so closely associated that many reference sources mistakenly say they were twins, were the first people to take the now-common route from movie-crazed kid to industry professional, later the path of film-makers as different as Jean-Luc Godard and Steven Spielberg. As schoolboys, the Gordons founded a film society, then wrote for fan magazines and performed menial roles on low-budget productions, always motivated by a boundless enthusiasm for the films...

With The Turin Horse opening in France on November 30 and the Béla Tarr retrospective at the Centre Pompidou running from December 3 through January 2, Capricci will be releasing Jacques Rancière's Béla Tarr, le temps d'après on November 29.

David Lynch's new album, Crazy Clown Time (which, again, you can listen to in full at NPR for the time being), has the Guardian building an annex to its special section on Lynch, "David Lynch's Film&Music," wherein you'll find Xan Brooks's interview, Cath Clarke on the newly rediscovered 50 minutes of never-before-seen footage from Blue Velvet (they'll be "re-edited — supervised by Lynch — into an extra on a new DVD celebrating the film's 25th anniversary (available early next year in the UK)," Michael Hann listening in while Lynch and Zz Top's Billy Gibbons discuss "the beauty and power of industry" and more. Related listening: Lynch and 'Big' Dean Hurley's mixtape at Pitchfork.

With thoughts from Tom Weaver on the producer of Devil Doll.

Prolific author and legendary film buff Tom Weaver has been a friend of Tfh since before we existed, and his essential series of book-length interviews with horror/sci fi filmmakers, writers and actors has mirrored what we try to do here at the site, which is disseminate information and opinions on the movies we all love.

Tom’s latest book examines the career of Devil Doll producer Richard Gordon, friend of both Karloff and Lugosi, one of the first fans-turned-pro and whose long career has finally ended. Richard was 85.[More about The Horror Hits of Richard Gordon here.]

Here’s Tom:

As Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog once pointed out, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas (etc.) are called the first people to have grown up movie nuts and then become moviemakers themselves, but Years before them came Alex and Richard Gordon, who loved movies as kids in England, belonged to fan clubs,...

The man who teamed Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee together for the first time in 1958′s Corridors Of Blood and brought us the flying brains in Fiend Without A Face (1958) is gone. A great loss to the Horror Film community, Richard Gordon not only produced a string of beloved horror films in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, but was a staple at conventions and a huge supporter of those who wrote on the subject of film. He produced his last film 30 years ago but his always-informative ‘letters to the editor’ to a variety of publications from small-time fan magazines up to the New York Times, offering corrections, and recollections, remain an enduring legacy for film fans.

Born in England, Gordon moved to the U.S. in 1947, and two years later, at age 23, he set up his own company Gordon Films, distributing imported films in the United States. Joined by writer Tom Weaver,...

Following rounds 1 and 2, this one will take us right on through the countdown to Halloween and will surely be the most actively updated of the bunch. Best to begin, then, by grounding it in a classic, so we turn to David Kalat: "Frankenstein isn't a science fiction story about an arrogant scientist who intrudes on God's domain, it's a metaphor about our relationship to God." That's his argument, and I'll let him explain, but I want to pull back to a couple of earlier sentences in his piece. Mary Shelley's novel, "and the 1910 film version, treated the 'science' of Frankenstein as just so much folderol, a MacGuffin to introduce the artificial man into the story. Whale was so good at providing a reasonably convincing visualization of reviving the dead — no, more than that, a stunningly satisfying visualization of reviving the dead — it focused popular attention on that part of...

There was a period in the early to mid-1950s where the horror genre, in hindsight, was appearing to go through somewhat of a period of transition. Not just caterpillar to butterfly in terms of the material, but also the beginnings to a passing of the torch from the Universal Pictures horror icons to the next generation of scare feature personalities. The 1940s, arguably, began the period of movement away from the creature features of the Universal monster pictures and started to explore deeper psychological, and supernatural elements of the horror genre over the course of the decade with the output of films from the Val Lewton team of collaborators at Rko. That period could possibly mark the first time that a major studio distributed a sequence of psychological thrillers sold as horror pictures over that length of time here in the United States, and probably the most significant since the silent-era German Expressionist pictures of the...